John Brown's Soul

Posted October 16, 2009

John Brown’s Soul
by Glenn W. LaFantasie

Many years ago, I toyed with the idea of writing a long essay or a short book on John Brown, the fiery abolitionist. I started the project several times over, but it never really got off the ground. In the meantime, a number of good books about Brown—including a powerful novel by Russell Banks, a collection of astute essays edited by Paul Finkelman, a superb analytical work on Brown and some of his supporters by John Stauffer, and an impassioned biography by David S. Reynolds—have been published, and my own project got sidetracked by my other writing and teaching commitments. But John Brown still nags at me. I wonder if I have not written anything meaningful about him simply because he is a difficult historical figure to deal with. His ideals were high, his devotion to the principle of equality was sincere, and his cause—the abolition of slavery—was pure and just, yet the violent means he used to attain his goals makes him seem like nothing more than a terrorist. This is the problem that every writer has faced, whether historian or novelist, about John Brown, and I fear that it has blocked my desire to say something about him in print. What I have struggled with, more than anything else, is the idea that Brown was not an aberration, a mad terrorist who rose up on the American stage and shed blood for his cause in Kansas and Virginia. Rather than an aberration, my greatest suspicion is that Brown was very American in his use of violence. What concerns me most about John Brown, I suppose, is that he was really not out of the mainstream—that his use of violence, during a decade that advanced the violent contest between North and South toward war, was an expression of America’s worst tendencies and a window into the darkest corner of the American soul.

Below are a few paragraphs of what I have written so far about John Brown. They don’t say very much, apart from attempting to offer some insights about Brown and the nature of American violence. But they do reveal, to some degree, why I have had such a difficult time writing about him and putting my opinions of him down on paper. Maybe someday I will finish this project. If you have any comments on what I have written, I’d like to see them. Please send them along to me at prof@glennlafantasie.com.

I gave this, in slightly different form, as a paper at a discussion panel, "His Truth Goes Marching On: John Brown 150 Years Later," at Western Kentucky University on the 150th anniversary of Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, October 16, 2009, sponsored by the Department of History, the University Libraries, and the Center for the Study of the Civil War in the West. This was the university's first in a series of events that will commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. For more on John Brown, see the paper below by John Hardin, my colleague at WKU, who made his presentation during the same panel discussion.

Most people do not think of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, as an American shrine. It is not like Valley Forge or the Alamo or even Ground Zero in New York. These places, most Americans would probably admit, are hallowed ground, plain and simple. Harpers Ferry is a beautiful place where some terrible history has taken place. But it doesn’t qualify as sacred soil in the depths of our American soul.

But even if Harpers Ferry cannot qualify as a hallowed site, it has much to say about the American experience. Harpers Ferry National Historical Park and the surviving modern town adjacent to it are nestled in the deep shadows of the Blue Ridge mountains on a sharp point of land that juts out between the Potomac and Shendandoah Rivers. History flows through Harpers Ferry, just as it does along the mighty currents of the two famous rivers that join together just below the town.

Within the park, many of the historic structures have been restored to their nineteenth-century appearance. One modern writer has remarked wryly that "the place looks better now than it has at any time since Thomas Jefferson’s visit over 200 years ago." When he was there, Jefferson was overwhelmed by the beauty of the place. It was, he wrote, "one of the most stupendous scenes in Nature" and certainly "worth a voyage across the Atlantic."

There is no denying its physical beauty, which is as breathtaking today as it was in Jefferson’s day. Resting at the foot of the surrounding blue hills and massive stone cliffs, which create stunning contrasts of shade and light across the face of the town, Harpers Ferry is an absolute wonder to behold. But there is also something quite unsettling about the place. The brooding ruins of old factories and the empty stone shells of delapidated buildings, the endless force of the rivers as they flow mightily or gently (depending on the season) by the town, the abundant signs of devastation caused by repeated floods over the years, the now silent landmarks associated with John Brown and his abortive raid on the armory and arsenal in 1859, and the tragic reminders of a town caught between contending armies in the Civil War—all of these things create an ominous tone, an atmosphere of gloom, that the scenic splendor of Harpers Ferry cannot be entirely offset.

Perhaps it is because the town is so vulnerable to destruction, even today. In 1996, two floods—one in January and the other in September—inundated the lower town, where most of the park’s property is located, with more than twenty-nine feet of water each time. Since the town’s founding, freshets have disturbed its tranquility and productivity. In the years before John Brown’s Raid, floods routinely interrupted work at the U.S. armory, arsenal, and rifle works. After the Civil War, high water continued to disrupt the town and the lives of its residents. An autumn flood in 1870 claimed forty-two lives and caused uncalculable damage. Nowadays, when the floods come and the waters finally recede, the National Park Service must close down the park and, in the aftermath of the rushing waters, take up the job once more of reconstructing buildings and exhibits that had previously been refurbished to perfection. Even with flood control up river, there is no stopping the power of nature at Harpers Ferry.

But the menacing feeling that always seems to be below the surface at Harpers Ferry goes beyond a human wariness of nature’s unrelenting wrath. Underneath Harpers Ferry natural beauty and fury, there is the more disturbing fact that this small town, this otherwise quiet hamlet resting in the soft cradle of the Blue Ridge mountains, has had a very violent history. It was John Brown who brought violence to Harpers Ferry 150 years ago today, and in so doing he changed the character and the significance of the place forever.

My first impression of John Brown came in my youth, when I first saw a startling painting of him in the pages of American Heritage magazine. The original portrait, part of a huge mural painted by John Steuart Curry in the Kansas state capitol, shows a wild, crazed man, wide-eyed and wind-blown, with arms outstretched. Behind him a dark tornado sweeps across the Kansas plains. Brown’s mouth is open, and he is howling something—heaven knows what. I found the picture unnerving and downright frightening, which no doubt was Curry’s intention. At the tender age of ten, I decided that Brown would not be included in my private pantheon of American heroes.

Later I began to struggle with that decision. In another issue of American Heritage, I came upon yet another painting of Brown, this one showing an entirely different fellow. The illustration is a famous one, painted by Thomas Hovenden, depicting Brown as he leaves the jailhouse in Charlestown, Virginia, on December 2, 1859, on his way to the gallows. As he descends some stairs, an African American mother lifts her baby up towards him, and he, in response, leans over to kiss the child. This scene never actually happened: a New York Tribune reporter, taking a great deal of journalistic license, included the fictional baby-kissing story in a dispatch, and the story became quickly embedded in the John Brown legend.

The contrasting pictures graphically demonstrate that two different John Browns have come down to us since the time of his famous raid on Harpers Ferry and his execution by the Commonwealth of Virginia for treason in December 1859. During his own lifetime some Americans, especially Southerners and proslavery sympathizers, called him crazy, a madman who had hoped to incite slave rebellions throughout the South. In the North, conservatives and Southern sympathizers agreed that Brown must have been insane. Among Republicans, Abraham Lincoln and others did not shrink from denouncing Brown’s actions and methods. Other Northerners, though, saw Brown quite differently. Abolitionists, particularly radical ones, considered Brown a hero, an "angel of light," as Henry David Thoreau called him. Even political antislavery advocates—Northerners who hoped to end slavery by legislative means and condemned Brown’s violent tactics—admitted that the man’s heart seemed to be in the right place when it came to taking action against the peculiar institution.

Opinions have always been divided about John Brown. Ever since his controversial rise to fame as a violent abolitionist during the 1850s, and his dramatic trial and hanging for treason in Virginia on the eve of the Civil War, Brown has been regarded by Americans as both saint and sinner. In his official report, Colonel Robert E. Lee, who had commanded the federal troops that captured Brown at Harpers Ferry, wrote that the raid on the arsenal there "was the attempt of a fanatic or madman." In the North, Abraham Lincoln, while noting the possible nobility of Brown’s cause, believed that nothing could "excuse violence, bloodshed and treason." More enthusiastically, Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "the new saint," who, by his martyrdom, "will make the gallows glorious like the cross."

In our own day, Brown still stirs up controversy and sets people—especially historians—at odds with one another. As Alfred Kazin has said, "The historical and imaginative literature about John Brown is enormous, embittered, usually extreme." Yet among one group of Americans—African Americans—there seems to be a consensus about John Brown that exists among no other segment of the society. For black Americans, John Brown is a hero, and ever since his death they have sustained their high opinion of him and have elevated him to a place occupied by few whites. "When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared," wrote Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became an indefatigable advocate for black civil rights during and after the Civil War. "He was," said Douglass, "a just man and true." A century later, Malcolm X proclaimed to his fellow blacks: "John Brown . . . was a white man who went to war against white people to help free slaves. And any white man who is ready and willing to shed blood for your freedom—in the sight of other whites, he’s nuts."

John Brown has become the stuff of legend as well as history, and it is the legend more than anything else that captures our imagination and furnishes us with the two John Browns, one violent and villainous, one benevolent and heroic. There is, however, more to it than that. Legend or not, something deep down in our American soul truly shocks us about the man, like the way that mural portrait of him as an avenging angel made my hair stand on end as a kid. John Brown disturbs us so much, so powerfully, that we want to explain him away—as quickly as possible. A more famous photograph of him, taken in the spring of 1859, just a few months before the Harpers Ferry raid, suggests why we feel so much uneasiness about him. Take one look into his eyes. There’s fire in them, more than in the discomforting Curry painting, and his riveting eyes are something you can neither avoid nor ever forget. In that disquieting stare something much clearer than his mental state is immediately evident. You can see this is a man of deadly purpose.

D. H. Lawrence once wrote that "the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." Indeed, a deep river of violence runs throughout the American experience, and it cannot be ignored or avoided. Not every American, to be sure, fits Lawrence's brutal description, but there is a strain in all of us that lets us denounce the violence that besets our society while we passively tolerate it. To a great extent, our own ambivalence is a lot like what one sees and senses in modern Harpers Ferry: to the naked eye, all is serene and resplendent; beneath it all, there’s that disquieting feeling of doom. The reality of nature’s violence lives in Harpers Ferry, and so does the legacy of human violence. With the zeal of a true believer, for he was convinced that God ordered and condoned his actions, John Brown took up the sword and used it ruthlessly and bloodily—and, it must be said, without giving much contemplation to what he was doing or to the malevolence he was spreading. His violence seemed almost instinctive and reflexive, like the violence that leads troubled souls to shoot random victims in a shopping mall or on a college campus. John Brown was convinced that his righteous cause justified his violent means, just as religious terrorists down through time and now, in our own uneasy age, have shed blood in name of their gods and prophets.

Perhaps that is why many Americans, in the wake of the Harpers Ferry raid, believed Brown was insane. A good number of historians have also argued that Brown must have been crazy—or, at the very least, chronically depressed or a manic depressive. But in doing so they miss a vital point beyond Malcolm X’s discerning comment about why whites think Brown was nuts. Brown’s use of violence in the sectional controversy over slavery may have been abhorrent, but it was not necessarily aberrant. Like H. Rap Brown, another African-American militant of the 1960s, John Brown knew that violence was as American as cherry pie.

But we would prefer to think that Brown was insane or bipolar or maybe emotionally challenged because it is far too horrifying to acknowledge that Brown sprang from a long tradition of American violence and that he was, in so many respects, a product of the American soul. Americans tend to deny that violence is in our soul, for though we understand that much of our past has been filled with violence, and that much of our present is torn apart by violence, we find it very difficult to face up to the fact that we are, in the end, a very violent people and that aggression may be found at the very core of our experience as a people and a nation. We think of ourselves as an eminently peaceful people. We deny that D. H. Lawrence looked with any kind of clarity into our soul. As Richard Hofstadter puts it: "What is most exceptional about the Americans is not the voluminous record of their violence, but their extraordinary ability, in the face of that record, to persuade themselves that they are among the best-behaved and best-regulated of peoples."

John Brown attracts us and repels us at the same time, but what we are most reluctant to admit is that his actions, and particularly his violent deeds, were—and are—quintessentially American. In that sense, then, what we cannot face is that John Brown is not an aberration. What we truly cannot face is that John Brown is us.

Copyright © 2009 by Glenn W. LaFantasie